A look at the pros and cons of Britain’s favourite political campaign tactic.

The only form of political advertising allowed on British television is the party political broadcast—stilted affairs watched by few. So politicians spread the word with leaflets, posters and junk mail. In 2010 they spent £7m ($11m) on outdoor advertising, nearly a third of total political ad spending, according to Nielsen, a market-research firm. Scottish nationalists, flush with cash from a lottery-winning couple, will do battle by billboard in the run-up to this September’s independence vote.

Is this wise? For most products, outdoor advertising is “the worst-performing of all offline media”, says Ian Fermor of Ebiquity, a company that measures such things. Defenders of the medium say this ignores the potential for longer-term brand building.

A radical plan to allow Britons to vote in parliamentary elections using the internet is to be drawn up by the Commons Speaker, John Bercow, as part of a drive to bridge the divide between politicians and the public…

We have released version 2.0 of The Online Activist Platform. This major upgrade improves the security and stability of your campaign website. It will also relieve webmasters of some of the more mundane tasks.

What’s Changed?

There are several innovations that make life easier for Webmasters.

Firstly we now will be carrying out the updates of WordPress, themes and plug-ins. Webmasters no longer need to concern themselves with this.

We have changed the SEO plug-in used. We now use the comprehensive and very well documented WordPress SEO by Joost de Valk

We have had to remove the popularity plug-in as it is no longer supported. Sorry about that if you liked this feature.

You will notice you no longer have the ability to install and activate Plugins. We do all that now, and we promise only to install Plugins from reputable vendor. This will enhances the security and stability of your website.

What’s do I Have to do?

Nothing, it has all been done for you.

Looking Ahead

In the next upgrade we intend to have several different templates available to give greater choice on the type of website you can create.

If there is any feature you want to see in a future version of The Online Activist Platform, then let us know and we will see what we can do.